so far behind

26 of 45

I haven't had a chance to quilt anything for several days and I am behind in my goal of one quilt a day.  Hopefully when school is out on Friday, I will have time to catch up.  Today is another LONG day of lab book grading.  I didn't quite get through half the books yesterday after 12 hours of grading.  Shame on me for procrastinating for so long.  I had 4 labs in my regular kids' books and 5 in my honors books.  The trouble is, we have labs back to back this time of year and there isn't time in between to drag the boxes of books home to grade them.  That's my excuse anyways.  But, this weekend I'm really feeling the pain of the procrastinating and surely wishing I had brought them home at least once.  Or had my TA's grade part of them.

I got in new rails for my quilting machine and am wanting to change them out too because they are really pitted and make for some wobbly quilting, but that is going to have to wait too.  It will take me about an hour to change them out and that's an hour I just don't have today.  Once these books are done, I will be free again!

Yesterday I did manage to get this quilt done while taking short breaks from the books.  Every row, I would get up and reset the machine and then race myself to see how much grading I could get done before having to get up and move the machine again.  

Of course, the Christmas cookies that the Special Ed aids made for all the teachers surely helped with the grading too.  Every year, they have a cookie exchange and give us all a bunch of cookies.  My husband doesn't eat his so I get extras.  I ate about 6 of them yesterday and the extra sugar helped me keep going on my marathon grading session.

That's all my husband does every weekend and every vacation.  Grade papers.  All day, every day.  He teaches 3 AP (advanced placement) classes and has 40 students in each class.  He's constantly grading papers.  I think I would go crazy if that was my life.  So, I guess I shouldn't complain as much as I am now.

At least most of the time I get my grading done at school, or have my TA's get most of it done. :)  My fellow teachers think I'm crazy to have 3 TA's (plus my former student who comes back 2 days a week to help me) but I know what I'm doing.  I need my quilting time!

This quilt was made by our new special ed teacher who teaches our Emotionally Disturbed class.  She is giving it to a charity, I think as a fundraiser for breast cancer, but I may be wrong.  It may be going to someone who has breast cancer.  It was given to me by my friend Sandy who does a lot of bindings for our Binky Patrol group and she asked if I could quilt it quickly for her.